Yorick plowed on, unmindful of them. “But if I don’t clobber you, you’re gonna read it as contempt, and hate me worse. Still, it wasn’t the person who got frozen who was the problem—it was the spectators.”
“What’d you do—sell tickets?”
Yorick’s mouth tightened with exasperation. “You know how hard it is to be alone in these small tribes?”
“Yeah… I suppose that would be a problem.”
“Problem, hell! It was murder! Who wants you around if you can do that to them? And there’s one way to make sure you won’t be around. No, we’d have to get out of the village on our own first. Usually had a lot of help…”
“It’s a wonder any of you survived.” Then something clicked in Rod’s mind. “But you would, wouldn’t you? If anyone got too close, you could freeze him.”
“Long enough to get away, yes. But what do you do when you’ve gotten away?”
“Survive.” Rod stared off into the sky, imagining what it would be like. “Kind of lonely…”
Yorick snorted. “Never tried to make it on your own in a wilderness, have you? Loneliness is the least of it. A rabbit a day keeps starvation away—but a sabertooth has the same notion about you. Not to mention dire wolves or cave bears.”
Rod nodded thoughtfully. “I can see why you’d want to form a new tribe.”
“With what?” Yorick scoffed. “We weren’t exactly over-populated, you know. It was a long way between tribes—and not very many Evil-Eye espers in any one of ‘em. You might have one in a hundred square miles—and do you know how long a hundred miles is, on foot in rough country?”
“About two weeks.” But Rod was really thinking about Yorick’s choice of word—he’d said “esper,” not “witch” or “monster.”
“This is where your ‘Eagle’ came in?”
Yorick nodded. “Just in time, too. Picked us up one by one and brought us to this nice little mountain valley he’d picked out. Nice V high up, plenty of rain, nice ‘n’ cool all year ‘round…”
“Very cool in winter—I should think.”
“You should, ‘cause it wasn’t. Pretty far south, I suppose—’cause it never got more than brisk. ‘Course, there wasn’t enough game for the whole four thousand of us.”
“Four thousand? A hundred miles or more apart? What’d he do—spend a lifetime finding you all?”
Yorick started to answer, then caught himself and said very carefully, “He knew how to travel fast.”
“Very fast, I should think—at least a mile a minute.” Rod had a vision of a ground-effect car trying to climb a forty-five-degree slope. “And how did he get you up to that mountain valley? Wings?”
“Something like that,” Yorick confessed. “And it wasn’t all that big a valley. He taught us how to use bows and arrows, and we had a whee of a time hunting—but the Eagle knew that could only last just so long, so he got us busy on planting. And, just about the time game was getting scarce, our first maize crop was getting ready to harvest.”
“Maize?” Rod gawked. “Where the hell’d he get that?”
“Oh, it wasn’t what you think of as maize,” Yorick said quickly. “Little bitty ears, only about four inches long.”
“In 50,000 B.C. maize was just a thickheaded kind of grass,” Rod grated, “like some parties I could mention. And it only grew in the New World. Neanderthals only grew in the Old.”
“Who says?” Yorick snorted. “Just because we weren’t obliging enough to go around leaving fossils doesn’t mean we weren’t there.”
“It doesn’t mean you were, either,” Rod said, tight-lipped, “and you’ve got a very neat way of not answering the question you’re asked.”
“Yeah, don’t I?” Yorick grinned. “It takes practice, let me tell you.”
“Do,” Rod invited. “Tell me more about this ‘Eagle’ of yours. Just where did he come from, anyway?”
“Heaven sent him in answer to our prayers,” Yorick said piously. “Only we didn’t just call him ‘Eagle’ anymore—we called him the ‘Maize King.’ That way, we could stay cooped up in our little mountain valley and not bother anybody.”
“A laudable ideal. What happened?”
“A bunch of Flatfaces bumped into us,” Yorick sighed. “Pure idiot chance. They came up to the mountains to find straight fir trees for shafts, and blundered into our valley. And, being Flatfaces, they couldn’t leave without trying a little looting and pillaging.”
“Neanderthals never do, of course.”
Yorick shook his head. “Why bother? But they just had to try it—and most of ‘em escaped, too. Which was worse—because they came back with a whole horde behind ‘em.”
Rod was still thinking about the “most.”
“You’re not going to try to tell me your people were peaceful!”
“Were,” Yorick agreed. “Definitely ‘were.’ I mean, with five hundred screaming Flatfaces charging down on us, even the most pacifistic suddenly saw a lot of advantages in self-defense. And the Eagle had taught us how to use bows, but the Flatfaces hadn’t figured out how to make them yet; so we mostly survived.”
Again, “most.”
“But the Eagle decided he hadn’t hidden you well enough?”
“Right.” Yorick bobbed his head. “Decided we couldn’t be safe anywhere on Earth, in fact—so he brought us here. Or to Anderland, anyway.” He jerked his head toward the west. “Over that way.”
“The mainland,” Rod translated. “Just—brought you.”
“Right.”
“How!?”
“I dunno.” The Neanderthal shrugged. “He just took us to this great big square thing and marched us through, and… here we were!” He grinned. “Just like that!”
“Just like that.” It was strange, Rod reflected, how drastically Yorick’s IQ could change when he wanted it to. From the sound of it, the Neanderthals had walked through a time machine. Dread gnawed at Rod’s belly—was this Eagle one of the futurian totalitarians who had staged the rebellion two years ago? Or one of the futurian anarchists, who had tried to stage a coup d’etat?
Or somebody else from the future, trying to horn in on Gramarye?
Why not? If there were two time-traveling organizations, why not a third? Or a fourth? Or a fifth? Just how many time machines were hidden away on this planet, anyway? Could Gramarye be that important?
But it could be, he admitted silently to himself. He’d learned from a renegade Futurian that Gramarye would eventually become a democracy, and would supply the telepaths that were vital to the survival of an interstellar democracy. That meant that the futurian anarchists and totalitarians were doomed to failure—unless they could subvert Gramarye into dictatorship, or anarchy. The planet was a nexus, a pivotal element in the history of humanity—and if it was the pivot, Rod was its bearing.
The Eagle was obviously a futurian—but from which side? Rod certainly wasn’t going to find out from Yorick. He could try, of course—but the Neanderthal was likely to turn into a clam. Rod decided not to press the point—let Yorick finish talking; just sit back and listen. That way, Rod would at least learn everything the Neanderthal was willing to say. First get the basic information; then dig for the details. Rod forced a grin and said, “At least you were safe from Flatfaces… I mean, Cro-Magnons.”
“We sure were. In fact, things were really hunky-dory, for a while. We chased out the dinosaurs, except for the ones who couldn’t run fast enough…”
“How’d you handle them?”
“With a knife and fork. Not bad, with enough seasoning. Especially if you grind ‘em up and sprinkle it on top of some cornbread, with some cheese sauce.”
“I, uh, think we can, uh, delay that tangent.” Rod swallowed hard against a queasy stomach. “But I’m sure the regimental cook would love to hear your recipes.” There was a gagging sound from the soldiers behind him, and Tuan swallowed heavily. Rod changed the subject. “After you took care of the wildlife, I assume you cleared the underbrush?”